(1 March 1893 – 6 November 1964) was a pioneering Japanese

film director A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the film crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision. The director has a key role in choosing the cast members, p ...

and

film theorist Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for unde ...

Biography

Beginning with articles he submitted to

Yoshizawa Shōten was a film studio and importer active in the early years of cinema in Japan. Originally involved in the magic lantern business, Yoshizawa bought a cinématographe camera off a visiting Italian and began exhibiting motion pictures in 1897. Run by ...

's magazine ''Katsudō shashinkai'' while still a student, Kaeriyama developed a long series of critiques of contemporary

Japanese cinema The has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2021, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced. In 2011 Japan produced 411 feature films that ea ...

that would make him the leading spokesman of the

Pure Film Movement The was a trend in film criticism and filmmaking in 1910s and early 1920s Japan that advocated what were considered more modern and cinematic modes of filmmaking. Critics in such magazines as '' Kinema Record'' and '' Kinema Junpo'' complained th ...

in the 1910s. The ideas about what cinema should be that he developed in the journal ''

Kinema Record was a Japanese film magazine published during the 1910s that played an important role in the Pure Film Movement. In 1914, with no serious film magazines being published in Japan at the time, Norimasa Kaeriyama, Yoshiyuki Shigeno and other stud ...

'', which he helped found with Yukiyoshi Shigeno, were accumulated in his 1917 book, ''The Production and Photography of Moving Picture Drama'' (Katsudō shashingeki no sōsaku to satsueihō), an influential work that continued to be reprinted into the 1920s. Although an engineer by training, Kaeriyama entered the film industry, first at Nihon Kinetophone in 1914, and then at

Tennenshoku Katsudō Shashin was a Japanese film studio active in the 1910s. The name translates as the "Natural Color Moving Picture Company," but it was known as Tenkatsu for short. The company was formed in 1914 by remnants of the Fukuhōdō studio that did not take part i ...

(Tenkatsu) in 1917. It was at the latter that he was able to put his ideals into practice with films such as ''

The Glow of Life is a Japanese film directed by Norimasa Kaeriyama made in 1918 and released in 1919 by Tenkatsu. It is considered the first in a series of films aimed at reforming and modernizing Japanese cinema. Plot A country girl Teruko falls in love with ...

'' (Sei no kagayaki) and '' Maid of the Deep Mountains'' (Miyama no otome), which were filmed in 1918 with his production group, the Geijutsu Eiga Kyōkai, but released in 1919. These were hailed as some of the first "pure films" in Japan, in part because Kaeriyama was one of the first to use actresses in a Japanese produced film. Several figures who later made significant contributions to Japanese cinema worked with him on these projects, including

Minoru Murata was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and actor who was one of the major directors of the silent era in Japan. Career Born in Tokyo, Murata started out as a shingeki actor on the stage. Murata's troupe appeared in the first " pure films ...

(later a director),

Shizue Natsukawa was a Japanese actress. Career Natsukawa was born in Tokyo and first appeared on stage at age seven. She joined the Nikkatsu studio in 1927 and came to fame through such films as ''Kantsubaki'' and Kenji Mizoguchi's ''Tokyo March''. She married ...

, Iyokichi Kondō, and Sugisaku Aoyama (the latter all actors). Kaeriyama continued directing films until the mid-1920s, but rarely to much success. Afterwards, he returned to engineering work, while continuing to write how-to books on

filmmaking Filmmaking (film production) is the process by which a motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, starting with an initial story, idea, or commission. It then continues through screenwriting, casti ...

as well as pursuing the study of sex in cinema.

References

Bibliography

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kaeriyama, Norimasa Japanese film directors Film theorists 1893 births 1964 deaths Silent film directors